Why Cooking Might Be Better for Switching Off Than Watching TV

After a long day at work, collapsing onto the sofa and putting something on television feels like the obvious way to switch off. But if your body is watching Netflix while your brain is still conducting meetings, replaying conversations and thinking about tomorrow, you might need a different kind of distraction.

There is a particular moment at the end of a busy working day when you want your brain to stop. The laptop closes, the work phone goes down and technically you’re finished, but nobody appears to have informed your thoughts. You’re replaying something somebody said in a meeting, wondering whether you handled a conversation properly, remembering an email you forgot to send and allowing tomorrow’s problems to arrive several hours early. By the time you sit down in front of the television, you’re looking at the screen without really taking any of it in.

Cooking can offer something completely different. Not reheating something while checking your phone with the other hand, but actually cooking: choosing something you want to eat, putting some music on, chopping, stirring, tasting and creating something that requires enough of your attention that work has to move over for a while. It can become a surprisingly effective dividing line between the working day and the rest of your evening.

Watching television doesn’t always stop you thinking

Television can be brilliant escapism, and there are evenings when doing absolutely nothing except sitting on the sofa and watching something ridiculous is exactly what you need. The problem is that watching television can leave plenty of spare mental capacity for everything else. Your eyes might be occupied while your mind is still wandering through the working day, and it’s remarkably easy to watch a programme while simultaneously checking your phone, reading an email, scrolling through social media and mentally preparing for tomorrow.

Cooking demands more of your attention. There’s an onion that needs chopping, something on the hob that shouldn’t burn, a sauce that needs tasting and a recipe asking for an ingredient you were absolutely certain you bought but apparently didn’t. Instead of telling yourself not to think about work, which rarely works anyway, you’re giving your brain something completely different to concentrate on.

There is something satisfying about making something physical

A huge amount of modern work happens inside our heads and on screens. We type, read, talk, attend video calls, analyse information and move digital things from one place to another. Then we finish the working day and often move directly to another screen for entertainment. Cooking is different because it is physical and tangible. You chop vegetables, knead dough, season food, stir sauces, wash things and occasionally stand staring into the oven wondering whether something is actually supposed to look like that.

There can be something particularly satisfying about starting with a collection of ingredients and finishing with something you can actually see, smell and eat. After a working day full of problems that may still be unresolved when you leave, dinner provides a wonderfully straightforward sense of completion. You made something, you ate it and, assuming it went reasonably well, it was good. No follow-up meeting required.

Make something you actually want to eat

Because this is a wellbeing article, you might be expecting us to suggest preparing a beautifully balanced plate containing seventeen vegetables and something involving quinoa. We’re not. Eating a varied and balanced diet matters, of course, but the wellbeing benefit we’re interested in here is the activity itself and the enjoyment that comes with it.

Make a curry from scratch, attempt homemade pizza, perfect a steak, learn how to make pasta, spend far too long preparing a Sunday roast or try to recreate something brilliant you ate on holiday. Cooking something slightly outside your normal repertoire also requires more concentration, which can make it even better at dragging your attention away from work. It doesn’t need to be MasterChef difficult; nobody needs that additional pressure on a Wednesday night just interesting enough to keep you engaged.

And if it turns out terribly, order a pizza. There are no performance reviews happening in your kitchen.

Put the phone somewhere else

If you really want cooking to become a way of switching off, don’t bring the office into the kitchen with you. Put your phone somewhere you can’t automatically reach for it every time you have 30 seconds to spare, choose some music, turn on the radio or listen to a podcast that has absolutely nothing to do with work.

There is something wonderfully different about spending an hour chopping, stirring and listening to music after spending the entire day answering questions and looking at screens. You’re still occupied and your brain still has something to do, but for once you’re not being professionally useful. That can be exactly what you need.

Cooking can be social too

Cooking doesn’t have to be something you do alone. Make dinner with your partner, get the children involved or invite a friend over. There is a different kind of conversation that often happens when you’re doing something alongside somebody rather than sitting opposite them deliberately trying to have “quality time”. You talk while chopping something, somebody steals food before it’s ready, you disagree about how much garlic is too much garlic and eventually everybody sits down and eats.

After a working day dominated by purposeful conversations, meetings that need decisions, calls that need outcomes and emails that need answers, it can be refreshing to have conversations that aren’t trying to achieve anything at all.

It can become a hobby rather than another chore

Cooking can also become something you genuinely enjoy getting better at. You might get interested in barbecue, bread, pizza ovens, curries, smoking meat, baking, pasta or attempting to create the world’s greatest roast potato. You can become unnecessarily knowledgeable about knives if that’s what makes you happy.

The important part is that there is no professional purpose attached to any of it. You aren’t learning something to add to your CV, improve your business or become more productive. You’re learning because it’s interesting and because the end result tastes good. Adult life can become surprisingly short of activities we do simply because we enjoy them, and cooking has one significant advantage over many hobbies: you needed to eat anyway.

Make dinner the dividing line between work and home

One of the hardest parts of modern working life is that there often isn’t a clear moment when work ends. This is particularly true if you work remotely or have email and messages constantly available on your phone. You can stop working physically while continuing to work mentally for hours afterwards.

Creating a simple evening ritual can help establish that boundary. Work finishes, the phone goes away, music goes on and cooking starts. Over time, that sequence can become a signal that one part of your day has ended and another has begun. You certainly don’t need to spend two hours cooking every night, some evenings dinner genuinely needs to come out of the freezer, but making the process itself part of your evening once or twice a week can feel completely different from treating food as another job to get through.

And then watch the television

This isn’t an anti-TV campaign. Once you’ve cooked something good, eaten it and cleared the kitchen, by all means collapse onto the sofa and put a film on. The difference is that you’ve already created some distance between yourself and work. You’ve spent an hour concentrating on something else, doing something physical and producing something tangible. Perhaps you’ve talked to somebody, listened to music and managed not to look at your work phone for a while.

You might discover that when you finally sit down, you’re actually watching what is on the television rather than staring straight through it while mentally participating in tomorrow morning’s meeting.

Cooking won’t be everybody’s way of switching off. For somebody else it might be golf, fishing, gaming, gardening, cycling, woodworking or disappearing into the garage to work on something nobody else in the household entirely understands. The activity itself isn’t really the point. What matters is finding something capable of holding enough of your attention that work can’t occupy all of it.

Because switching off doesn’t always mean doing nothing. Sometimes the easiest way to stop thinking about one thing is to become completely absorbed in something else.

So tonight, instead of moving directly from the work screen to the television screen, open the fridge, find something good, put some music on and cook.

Work can wait until tomorrow.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.

Or, if you’re ready to get back to what’s happening across the sector, catch up with today’s Daily News for the latest health and social care stories.